Selling the Plant

Gray Merriam | Mar 15, 2023

Selling the plant

Cavanagh Construction proposes to dig up 87 acres down to below the water table around Barber’s Lake in Lanark Highlands. You may have been there when visiting Wheelers Pancake House. If your response is: that’s not in our neighbourhood, shame! Yes it is our neighbourhood!

Beyond neighbourly, they propose to sell our landscape and everything on it. Literally dig up and send away 125 acres of landscape along Highland Line.

One million tonnes per year.

The pit would dig into the water table and would impact surface waters at Barber’s Lake and Long Sault Creek, one of the headwaters sources of the Mississippi Valley Watershed and a spawning creek for native Brook Trout.

As we struggle to conserve our high diversity landscape, we are presented with a proposal to destroy the factory where that diversity is made and maintained. Burn down the factory so we can make one last dollar? Our landscape has no value until it is sold on the market. Beauty and heritage have no price so they have no values.

Gray Merriam